Patricia J. Parsons

The romance of the library: A writer’s refuge

Posted on 27 May 201527 May 2015 by Patricia J. Parsons

The rare book library at the University of Toronto is open to the public.

This past weekend I found myself roaming the spaces inside the rare book library at the University of Toronto and thinking about novelist Rita Mae Brown when she wrote: “When I got my library card, that’s when my life began.” I suspect I could have said the same thing. I have always loved a library, and this visit brought back a flood of memories, and reminded me about what a real, book-filled library can mean to writers.

When I was 16 years old I started my first part-time job. I was paid 80 cents an hour to work ten hours a week in the local children’s library. A writer and book lover even then, I was elated not only at the extra $8.00 I had to spend (or save if I was feeling virtuous), but most especially because I could spend those hours among the stacks, re-shelving books and helping kids find that perfect read. The next year I started university and got another library job; this one was completely devoted to stacking books among the very many, multi-tiered spaces that constituted the main library at my university. I was still delighted to breathe in that unmistakable smell of books. I loved it until I could no longer afford the time away from my studies and that was that.

Years later I found myself toiling as a university professor; again the library became an important refuge for both work and for research. But the end was drawing nigh. Online resources became so much more convenient, saving me both time and effort thus permitting me to accomplish so much more. The digital book became a god-send, although I thought that I’d probably not go that way for my own leisure reading. I was wrong.

Today I cannot imagine not carrying my library around with me on a mini-tablet. I cannot imagine not being able to highlight with a click of a finger-tip, or to make a note that will immediately be filed in order. I cannot imagine a student today wanting to lug around heavy books. But none of this means that I like a real, book-filled library with a real, living, breathing librarian any less, nor does it mean that the library is any less important to culture in general and to writers in particular.

So what does this real library offer today’s digitally-savvy writer? Here’s what it means to this writer.

How could you not be inspired by such books as an original Chaucer?? You have to go to a library to find these gems.

“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunken treasure.” So said Virginia Woolf, and so do I. Libraries are treasure troves of writing ideas. You can go into a library without a single notion of what to write, and come out with a journal full of ideas. Although free roaming can be inspiring, if you have a general area of interest you can go to that section of the library and begin scanning book titles. Or, what’s even more fun, you can randomly select a few books from the stacks, find a comfortable place to curl up with them (libraries are full of these areas) and begin to explore between the covers.
“A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life. “ I like to think that Norman Cousins was echoing my own notion that when you have an idea for a piece of writing, but are not entirely sure how to get it from the beginning germ of an idea to a fully finished piece, you go to the library and allow that idea to gestate and elaborate. I begin by searching for a specific book about the topic area. For example when I started writing about Edgar Allan Poe in In the Shadow of the Raven and I had an idea about the female heroine, I went into the university library and searched for a book about 19^th century women. I found a wonderful and very old book that was just the inspiration I needed to get into the character. Then all you have to do is scan the shelves near to your first book to see related but increasingly divergent topics. Just get to know the cataloguing system in the library of your choice. Often public libraries use the Dewey Decimal System, while university libraries use the Library of Congress System. And yes, you can go into a university library to peruse the books even if you can’t take them home.
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one.” Neil Gaiman hit the nail on the head with this one. Librarians are amazing professionals. I have never met a single one who wasn’t delighted to help me find that exact resources for me. That’s because finding materials is what they do and they do it very well. Start with Google of course, but get that one crucial piece of information from a real person. The American Library Association put it this way: “When you absolutely positively have to know, ask a librarian.”

Libraries can be magical places for writers. You can have your coffee shop writing sessions or your marathon computer stints, but I’d recommend trying a library appointment with yourself.

I’ll let Frank Zappa have the last word: “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”

Book marketing, Book promotion, Electronic Publishing, Ethics

When is a bestseller not a bestseller?

Posted on 20 May 201520 May 2015 by Patricia J. Parsons

So, what does it take to be a bestselling writer? In fact, what does it take for a book to be a bestseller? Have you ever gazed on the New York Times bestseller list, or the Amazon list of today’s best sellers and wondered how these books got there? I know I have, and even more to the point, recently I’ve often wondered what it really means when an author’s LinkedIn or Twitter profile says “bestselling author of…” and I’ve never heard of them. The truth is that whatever you may have thought through the years, whatever you infer from those “bestselling” monikers, all bets are off. The landscape has changed. It ain’t what it used to be. And that’s important – for readers. And for writers who actually care.

So I did some research (you’re welcome).

What is a bestseller?

Let’s begin by going back to definitions – dictionary and other. The Oxford English Dictionary, arguably one of the premier arbiters of word meanings in our language, says that a bestseller is “[a] book or other product that sells in very large numbers.”[1] Okay, this definition implies that there ought to be some kind of quantitative measure of what it takes to be a bestseller, although falling short of actually telling us what that number might be. However, the phrase “very large numbers” does have some resonance, n’est ce pas?

Back as far as 1955 a bestseller was defined as “a book for which demand, within a short time of that book’s initial publication, vastly exceeds what is then considered to be big sales.”[2] Again the concepts both of high demand and bigger than “big” sales.

Next, we’ll join the twenty-first century and see what other online definitions might offer to us in our quest for understanding. Of course, next stop Wikipedia which says this:

“A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling or frequently borrowed titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and library circulation statistics and then published by newspapers, magazines, or book store chains.”[3]

Wikipedia further suggests that the term is evidently not associated with any specific number of sales and that the term is often applied rather “loosely” often as a marketing ploy, but that it does, in fact, refer to a book that is “extremely popular.”

It seems, then, that a real bestseller is a popular book in high demand with high sales. As reasonably intelligent readers (or writers) we can conclude that a book isn’t a bestseller unless it sells lots and lots of copies. So how is it possible that so many of these online self-published authors suggest that they are bestselling authors? Remember what I said earlier? The landscape has shifted. Dramatically.

The Making of a Bestseller

In the past few years, it’s become clear that there are ways of manipulating online book sales figures to artificially create a bestseller, thereby giving the author marketing cred, even if it is a bit disingenuous. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that this is just a recent, eBook phenomenon.

Back in 1995, two ambitious consultants wrote a book titled The Discipline of Market Leaders which was published by Addison-Wesley. Rather than let it languish in a warehouse or gather dust on bookstore shelves only to be returned if unsold (the dreaded ‘returns’ of the book selling business – don’t get me started), the authors decided to figure out a way to get that book on the New York Times bestseller list so that they could use this as a springboard to marketing themselves as consultants, and thereby make more money. As business experts, they were willing to make a financial investment and take the risk that it would have a big payout in the end.

In summary (you can read the whole story in the online archive of Business Week linked in my footnotes below[4]) they spent $250,000 buying 10,000 copies of their own $25 book from small and large bookstores throughout the US resulting in it climbing to #8 on the NYT bestseller list where it stayed for 15 weeks and peaked at #1 on the BusinessWeek list. The results of this manipulation were spectacular for their consulting business: speaking engagements, new clients, future book deals. Illegal? No. Unethical? Clearly. Readers draw the conclusion that a book on the top of the bestseller list has made it there on its own merits. When it didn’t, those who colluded to get it there are effectively lying. That was then. This is now. And the opportunities for this kind of manipulation are even more available.

In 2013 Publisher’s Weekly tried to get bestseller numbers from Amazon, but were unsuccessful, so they decided to try to figure it out by looking at the status of a couple of books over the course of two weeks. They began with the hypothesis that was widely held that a book would have to sell 300 copies a day to reach the top five on Amazon’s list and found that this wasn’t far off, but that it varies considerably depending on the time of year.[5] For example, in holiday sales times, the numbers would have to be higher. Nevertheless, if you can get approach this level of sales for a day or two, whatever ranking you achieve on the bestsellers list sticks with the book based on the Amazon algorithm. And there you have a “bestseller” that doesn’t even come close to the definitions above, nor the connotation associated with it by potential readers. So, just about anyone can use the term bestselling author based on just about any criteria he or she decides applies. Hmm.

So, when is a best seller not a best seller?

A few years ago, my husband and I wrote a piece on our travel blog The Discerning Travelers about when a perk (from an airline, a hotel etc. via loyalty programs) is not a perk. We concluded that a perk is not a perk when everyone has it (for our full explanation read The ups and downs of travel loyalty programs: When is a perk not a perk?). It loses its real meaning.

I submit to you that when everyone is a so-called bestselling author, no one is. And that is sad. I’d love to be a bestselling author, but I’m more interested in being a writer. When the term bestseller now applies to everyone and his or her dog, I don’t really care about that anymore. How about you?

[1] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/bestseller

[2] Steinberg, S. H. 1955. Five Hundred Years of Printing. as quoted in Wikipedia.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestseller

[4] Did dirty tricks create a bestseller? August 7, 1995. Business Week (from the online web archive), http://goo.gl/lmqR9y

[5] Gabe Habash. March 10, 2013. How Many Copies Does It Take To Be an Amazon Bestseller? Not So Much. http://goo.gl/ULwI6a

Self-Publishing, Vanity Publishing

Self-publishing versus vanity publishing: What’s the difference anyway?

Posted on 12 May 201512 May 2015 by Patricia J. Parsons

Before self-publishing had any kind of credibility (one of my assumptions here is that it has risen a notch or two on the credibility barometer in recent years,) it was referred to strictly as vanity publishing. Presumably it was vain for an author to pay to have his or her book published. I’ve never been sure why it isn’t vanity recording when a musician pays to have a CD recorded and subsequently distributed, but perhaps that is another discussion.

According to a man by the name of Jonathon Clifford, he coined the phrase vanity publishing around 1960.[1] Clifford’s lifetime crusade was for honesty in the vanity publishing world. It is true that over the years, authors who could not get – or did not try to get – mainstream publishers (often now referred to as traditional or legacy publishers) would pay to have their work produced, and those vanity publishers would suggest to the authors that they could, perhaps, just maybe, probably get rich. That was the problem. As Clifford says:

“If you cannot find a mainstream publisher to publish your work at their expense, you must look on the whole process of publishing not as money invested to make you a return, but as money spent on a pleasurable hobby which you have enjoyed and which has provided you with well-manufactured copies of your book. If you do also manage to make a small profit, then that should be looked upon as an unforeseen and unexpected bonus”[2]

Things haven’t really changed all that much. At the end of the day, most writers – even those traditionally published – make less than $5000 a year, indeed most make much less than that. Today, the notion of the vanity press (versus other self-publishing options) seems to be tied into the issue of promises made by these entities – promises that they cannot possibly keep. So, the term self-publishing has arisen to take the place of vanity publishing, and it seems to have taken on a less pejorative connotation.

Self-publishing, from the author’s point of view though, is exactly the same as vanity publishing. The author pays. And any author who thinks a publisher, regardless of whether they make you pay or they pay you, can predict much less guarantee sales success of your book, is naïve in the extreme. Unless you have a name that is widely recognized, there is no way to predict sales. This is where my personal skepticism begins to creep into the relationship between author and publisher. But, it is now time for me to come clean as they say.

What seems like a hundred years ago now, I did take up with one of those vanity publishers two years after my first non-fiction book was published by a ‘real’ publisher.

The book was called Confessions of Failed Yuppie. And it was funny. It was nothing like what I had written previously, nor like anything I have written since (although I did recently re-write it and make it available as an e-book). The vanity press I chose was one of the big ones in New York. They took my seriously substantial fee and provided me with two cartons of the 130-page, hard-covered books. I was thrilled. But something kept me from mentioning its provenance to anyone – although I’m not sure anyone would have cared. Many of my friends read the book and told me that they were amused. I even still get a small check every year from the Public Lending Right Commission[3] in Canada because there are copies of it in libraries across the country. Anyone want to read it?

So, what’s wrong with this kind of model? What makes a vanity-published book, or a self-published book less worthy than a book published via the more traditional publishers? In a word, quality – but not necessarily quality of the content, story, theme or writing. It is often the quality of the editing as well as the production values – the cover and interior design mainly. The problem with self-publishing is that it permits you to publish without any kind of quality controls.

In the grand scheme of things, I believe that self-published books, and books published by as-yet-to-be-created business models that include the authors, will, indeed be the way of the future. I think that these models will find ways to enhance both the quality and the reputation of the products. Until then, those of us who are concerned about quality will continue to write, publish, market and hope that our work will stand on its own in the eyes of the readers.

Professor Dana Weinberg, co-author of the 2014 report Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest Survey[4] commented as follows:

“Publishing a book for sale is a matter of both art and commerce. I would argue that for most writers publishing is not only about money; it’s about a lot of other things including touching readers and sharing stories, but the money is important in a lot of ways.”[5]

It seems that not much has changed for authors and their love of writing since Jonathan Clifford wrote about vanity publishing. And perhaps it never will.

[This post is largely — but not entirely — excerpted from Who Will Read Your Book? The Unknown Author’s Guide to the Realities of Writing & Publishing]

[1] Vanity Publishing: Advice & Warning. http://www.vanitypublishing.info/

[2] Johnathon Clifford. Vanity publishing – Advice ad warning. http://www.vanitypublishing.info/

[3] Canada Council for the Arts. PLR Frequently asked questions. http://www.plr-dpp.ca/plr/faq.aspx

[4]What advantages do traditional publishers offer authors? 2014 http://store.digitalbookworld.com/advantages-traditional-publishers-offer-authors-t3591

[5] Alison Flood. 2014. Most writers earn less than £600 a year, survey reveals. The Guardian online. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/17/writers-earn-less-than-600-a-year